Break Beats
One revolution sired another. Concurrently with disco, another group of New York DJs were also inventing another, equally world-shaking way of playing and dancing to records. In the seventies, hip-hop deejaying evolved as an artform unto itself in the clubs of the Bronx and Harlem, in particular. And just like the more popular disco DJs, the early hip-hop DJs’ sets traversed the boroughs—and went beyond them—on cassette dubs well before the Sugarhill Gang existed. They evolved differently: Hip-hop DJing can be expressive, but its quick cuts and ostentatious scratches often mark it out from house and techno’s longer builds, as one example. And scratching often works awkwardly with house and techno, though not always (cf. Terry Mullan).
Kenny Dope (last name Gonzales) was a hip-hop DJ before he joined Little Louie Vega to form Masters at Work and set the agenda of nineties house music. He released Break Beats during the decade’s final year, a cassette on his own homemade Dopewax imprint (it appeared on CD in 2004). Its composition was the same as mixes by lots of DJs mining hip-hop’s breakbeat roots—utilizing Ultimate Breaks & Beats, the 25-volume series issued in the late eighties by Bronx chauffer Lenny Roberts. Only Dope restricted himself further, sticking with the first eight volumes, which had artist Kev Roberts’ drawing of cute hand-drawn logo of an eight-armed DJ from the sea, before the LP labels switched to more prosaic word logos. These were known as the Octopus Breaks.
Around 2014, I saw Kenny Dope perform a Boiler Room 54 floors up in a pricy mid-Manhattan hotel, soundtracking a bunch of partygoers destroying a suite’s down pillows with a bunch of rap seven-inches and, to finish, “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” It felt less fraught than it would now and sounded great. That sensibility helps make Break Beats so satisfying—it’s a statement of roots in which rocking a crowd is paramount. I also suspect him of being such a digger that he may have used an occasional original LP pressing for his sources here. I wouldn’t put it past him.